5-18-06, 9:38 am

Editor's note: We present here the first installment of a four part extended memoir by Philip Bonosky on a trip he took to Asia in the late 1950s. This portion focuses on his brief stay in North Korea in the summer of 1959. The full essay was written during and immediately after the trip and parts of it may no longer reflect the author's thinking. It is, however, important for its recording of historical information generally ignored by mainstream sources.

Anyone who has a kind word to say about North Korea today takes his political, not to speak of literary, life in his hands. So thoroughly has that small country been demonized that it takes on a measure of heroism simply to try to strike a balance, assert a few obvious facts, and bring the subject back into the realm of reason where reasonable people may consider it.

I’m aware that I can say little in the present context of the 'war on terrorism' about a country that has been demonized as part of the 'axis of evil' and charged with plotting, planning or at least dreaming of atomic bombing the USA.

In 1959 I was invited by the North Korean Writers Union to visit North Korea as their guest. I had just finished six weeks in China where I had similarly been invited. My 10 days in North Korea were memorable and I made copious notes of it, which have lain dormant almost 45 years.

Interest in Korea had waned in any case and, in fact, the Korean War itself (1950-1953) was so thoroughly dismissed from public consciousness that it earned the designation of the 'Forgotten War' – 'forgotten,' yes, by the people of the US by and large for good and guilty reasons but not, and it will never be, by the Koreans. And this includes the South as well as the North. Much as I abhor any use of atomic weapons, I fully understand why a country, as helpless and vulnerable as North Korea would cling to any means of defending itself. In the Korean War, the US literally tried to wipe North Korea from the face of the earth killing one in 10, women and children included, in what can only be called and act of genocide. And yet all that the North Koreans are asking of the US is a promise not to invade their country a la Iraq, Vietnam, Grenada, etc., but to abide by the kind of promise President Kennedy gave to Castro not to invade Cuba.

The following notes reveal no profound insights in the times or the people. However, the tone in which they are written, even their naivete, is typical of how most progressives thought and felt at the time. Socialism seemed to be very much on the world’s agenda. With this perspective in mind the very innocence of these notes becomes unpremeditated evidence of good faith and a touch of the truth. Time will have corrected the bias and preserved anything of lasting value.

-1- Pyongyang, North Korea, July 1959

The delegation were all dressed in formal suits – suits of some coarse white material, which made me feel sorry for them in this July heat. I had come half-staggering off the plane dressed in no more than a pair of baggy slacks and a shirt open at the collar. Later, I would learn that dressing was considered essential for formal meetings, and Sung Chun (which was the name of my interpreter) had been taken aback at my informal, not to say sloppy attire. But I, on the other hands, was also taken aback somewhat by their formality and by the fact that intellectuals and officials seemed to dress somewhat differently from the masses.

Later, too, when we got to know each other better, I told Sung Chun how appalled I was to be introduced to him as my interpreter only to learn that I couldn’t understand the first word he said to me! He explained that he had been assigned to me, not because his English was good, but because it wasn’t; that being a Communist I would understand and allow him this opportunity to improve his English. So I became his 'teacher.'

When we got through customs, at last, we piled into cars and started toward the city proper. There, at the International Hotel, I was given a room – or rather, an apartment of a bedroom, sitting room and bath.

Then we started our tour of the city. Already on the way into the city I had glimpsed scenes that were absolutely unique to me, and quite different from China. I would be haunted by what was different here from China; for I had naively assumed that the Koreans somehow were another kind of Chinese. But they were not – as I would learn soon enough. They are a people distinct in themselves, with a long culture, a turbulent history, and they had already acquired an alphabet while the Chinese still – as they informed me, not without some pride – did not.

Everywhere the flying horse, Chullima, sped to the horizon. Everywhere, too, there were political slogans and the picture of Kim Il Sung. But everywhere, as well, were new houses – that had built on rubble. Pyongyang had been reduced to a vast graveyard of a city in which the people huddled for months in cellars and dugouts, tormented by US planes dropping napalm and incendiary bombs day after day and night after night until life became a purgatory of horror.

But now, as I drove down the tree-lined avenues, new buildings had sprung up. Not only were they new, they were enormously attractive, following an architectural style that was different form any I had so far seen. The buildings looked pleasant, airy and esthetic; they had numerous balconies and large windows. Later, in Hamheung I would see even more unique architecture which had been erected under the supervision of architects from the German democratic Republic.

We kept coming upon groups of workers, in military formation, with shovels slung over their shoulders, marching 'as to war' but actually on their way to some construction site. They were volunteers from another village perhaps, or students, and in some cases, they were soldiers. They always sang as they marched, stirring, deep-throated marching songs that would wake me, later, at the hotel early in the morning and be my lullaby at night.

I saw now the Taidong River for the first time. I visited the Morangong Park. I drove through the city and noted the building going on everywhere. I visited the gates to the Old City.

I was in Korea. That much I knew – and I also knew that they were more than just formally friendly. They wanted me to understand them and to tell my own people that I had come in the spirit of universal brotherhood and peace.

I came as a true American, who wanted nobody’s blood – or wealth.

-2-

July 6, 1959. Pyongyang, Korea.

Americans cannot understand – truly and sincerely cannot understand – why they are hated so profoundly by the people of the world. All sorts of reasons have been advanced for this hatred, which always leaves out the basic reason. We have heard that we are hated abroad, in South America, in Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. (and what is left?) because 1) we are rich, and therefore envied; 2) somehow we have bungled the job of putting across a true picture of our honest motives – the wrong image has been established; 3) the wrong kind of Americans, the ugly Americans have gone abroad and have left a bad impression because they flaunted their wealth and treated the native population with arrogance and contempt; 4) our new responsibility which had been 'thrust' on us by events and which we reluctantly accepted nevertheless involves certain unhappy sides to it, which cannot be expected to arouse support from all the people: for instance, it is our 'responsibility' to 'protect' the world form Communism and therefore we must do certain unpleasant things which people tend to misunderstand; and, 5) the real basic reason why we are misunderstood and disliked in so many places of the world is because of the diabolical and inhuman ingenuity in misrepresenting us that is the supreme talent of the Communists, and which, by the way, is further reason why they must be remorselessly combated and eliminated.

In Korea all of these reasons reduce themselves down to one simple reason: one out of ten North Koreans was killed by bombs, burned to a crisp by Napalm or were executed by Americans. By good – not ugly – church-going, vote-casting Americans. It came to one million, one-tenth of the population.

The only stories published in the US press, of course, have been stories of how badly treated US soldiers were, and how they suffered in this war against the rapacious, misled, backward and half-savage Korean Reds. I doubt that it crossed the mind of one out of ten US men or women to note, when they read accounts – published with delight in the US press – that all of North Korea – seventy-eight major cities – had been reduced to such appalling ruins that absolutely nothing could be salvaged form them; and that intermixed with these ruins were bits of babies, women, and men. Until a white American learns to permit himself to believe that a person of color from another country can suffer as acutely the pangs of loss as he himself can, then nothing will ever help to reduce the hatred of foreign colonialists for the Americans.

I would have the horrible experience of going where the most abominable deeds had been committed, and then be told that these atrocities were committed by the US military. Not even in China was there such an intense hatred of the US, and yet even in Korea this hatred was qualified and softened and even analyzed for me. This hatred, as far as I could tell, never touched me as an individual. This hatred was confined to the perpetrators of the crime against them – Pres. Truman, Gen. MacArthur, Allen Dulles, and the US soldiers who were pictured in numerous posters in what for me were absolutely shocking caricatures – for the first time in my life I would see Americans depicted as monsters.

I would point out, time and time again, that these were not typical Americans – these blond beasts with blood-soaked bayonets on which Koran babies had been spitted; surely, I often protested, it was understood that most of these soldiers had been brought to Korea, not because they chose to come, but because US reaction had sent them. Any look at the profit statements, by the way, between 1949-1952 will show one of the reasons why the war was so 'popular' in some quarters. For instance, the total corporation profits for the first year of the war went up $18.5 billion which was twice the annual profits coined during World War II, and five times the annual profits coined during the peace years between 1936-1939. War may be a bloody game, but it’s also profitable; it is the only 'game' that can change blood into gold – which is even a greater miracle than to change the blood of Christ into the wine of the Mass.

Truman’s cabinet during the Korean War read like a Who’s Who of big Business. His head of the Office of Defense Mobilization was Charles E. Wilson of General Electric (not to be confused with Charles A. Wilson of General Motors, and also head of the same department under President Eisenhower). He 'left' General Electric to enter the government, though awarded by his company an annual pension of $60,000. That year – 1950 – General Electric made $174,424,702 – the highest profit statement in its entire history.

General George E. Marshall, Sec. Of Defense, was also a member of the Board of Pan American World Airways, a Morgan Company. His position on the Korean War was stated implacably: 'Here is a situation where the Chinese can be made to feel, by continued destructive losses, that the Soviets have let them down.'

When President Truman was asked, during the war, to comment on the high US losses, his answer was, or should have been considered to be, classic: 'A drop in the bucket!' He meant by that the 70,000 casualties behind the lines were 'nothing – for if an atomic bomb had been dropped, it would have killed more than 70,000. Over 50,000 US troops were eventually killed, but in one year $18.5 billions were made. Such an equation between blood and profit is not new, however, in US history.

During the war, General Omar Bradley was asked by Senator Hickenlooper before the Senate Armed Services Committee: 'General Bradley, we have a great deal of discussion about this action in Korea and I thoroughly realize that our general objective is peace, peace and victory, but just specifically, what is our objective in Korea?'

General Bradley replied: 'Well, I think that is a fair question, and I think it is one that has bothered the people. We hope that by inflicting severe casualties upon the enemy and proving to them that they are not invincible, that they cannot gain anything by aggressive action, that it is too costly a matter, that they have been let down by Russia in getting into it, that they will be willing to negotiate a peace with the United Nations.'

In testimony given before a friendly Senatorial committee, June 25, 1951, Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell, Jr., would explain in more detail just what Truman and his coterie of advisers had in mind: 'We now have at our command a weapon that can really dish out some severe destruction, and let us go to work on burning five major cities in North Korea to the ground, and to destroy completely every one of about 18 major strategic targets.'

Prodded Chairman Sen. Richard B. Russell (Georgia): 'As I understood you, you intended to give them notice you had better get out of the war or we will burn your cities?'

General E. O’Donnell: 'I thought that we could take care of the humane aspects of the problem. We thought we could do it. Tell them to either stop the aggression and get back over the 38th parallel or they better have their wives and children and bedrolls [the record does not reveal whether laughter followed this sally] to go down with them because there is not going to be anything left up in North Korea to return to.'

Sen. John Stennis: 'Now, as a matter of fact, North Korea has been virtually destroyed, hasn’t it? Those cities have been virtually destroyed?'

Gen. O’Donnell, Jr.: 'Oh yes…I would say that the entire, almost entire, Korean peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name…. Just before the Chinese came in, we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea.'

Sen. Russell: 'I think you have demonstrated soldierly qualities that endeared you to the American people.'

Thus the aim of the war was put bluntly: to kill as many people as possible. The reason for keeping it from spreading into China was also put bluntly by Truman. To fight china would be to get involved in the 'wrong war'; the 'right war' – against the USSR – had to wait for a better time.

-3-

I sensed the dead accusing me everywhere that I went in this anguished land. But it was not because the Koreans themselves made a point of raising such accusations: I felt the accusations rise from the ruins that still existed all around, and form the missing that I felt in the population. One person was missing in every 10. Their absence from the land was almost tangible. I saw them in the fact that in all Korea the trees seemed to be less than ten years old: the tress had been destroyed utterly. Men, the ages of the military – the early 30s – were missing. Dogs and cats seemed to be missing. In the countryside, along the roads and railroads, even now, six years later, deep shell-holes pitted the landscape. When I rose in a plane, leaving Korea, I could look down on the fields and they seemed to me as if bombs had been dropped meticulously, checker-boarding every single square foot of land. Even where the land had been filled in, it retained the shadow of those ominous squares. I couldn’t that a people had survived such intense, inch by inch bombing; and having survived that they were able to pull themselves together to the point of struggling back to any level of hope that life could be resumed again.

And yet life had not only resumed it had triumphed. Korea, a land of the murdered, was not a sad land: it was, on the contrary, a land of tremendous hope and courage and optimism, expressed in the symbol of their flying horse, and in the fact that, whatever they had suffered, their mornings remained calm, in this land of calm mornings.

For Part II, click here

--Philip Bonosky is a contributing editor of Political Affairs, a former international correspondent for the People’s World, and the author of several books including Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War, Brother Bill McKie: Building the Union at Ford (International Publishers), the novels Burning Valley (University of Illinois Press) and The Magic Fern (International Publishers), and two collections of short stories.